Welcome to Patagonia

Poor picture of a lovely, restored building, the Pumalin Park HQ in Puerto Varas

I’ve become utterly disorientated and am struggling to determine what happens next after three days of travelling from Brazil’s central Amazon to the northern tip of Chilean Patagonia, compounding the intense experiences of the previous five weeks. I manage to hold it together enough to get to my accommodation for the night – the head office of the Pumalin Park - soon to be a new national park, in Puerto Varas. It’s late evening. My patient, kindly airport taxi driver allowed me to practice my Spanish on him as I have spent the last two weeks in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, which has returned my Spanish to square one again.

There to welcome me at the Pumalin Park office are Maria and Carolina, who has helped me make the necessary arrangements for the next section of my journey. Maria shows me around the impressive, homely building; it’s a huge, century-old, wooden house that has been restored to a high quality and with attention detail, but with a simple design. Natural materials, particularly wood, dominate and the new floorboards creak reassuringly. The refit may be recent, but the furniture is old and chunky and emits a bees’ wax scent that pervades the building. Hanging from any wall space large enough to accommodate them are impressive black and white photographs of Patagonia’s wildlife and scenery, framed in black wood. It’s a mind warp after Brazil's Amazon, but it’s a style that will become familiar and the stunning photographs dictate scenes in which I will be immersed for real in the very near future.



Carretera Austral and that funky duck!

In less than eight hours I am on the road again, waiting at the unwelcoming Puerto Montt bus station, the sun just rising and burning through the early sea mist releasing distant mountains to view. There are a couple of scruffy blokes and some stray dogs, one of which growls at a passer-by; the growl becomes a yelp after a well-aimed kick by one of the scruffy blokes. I wait with some trepidation as I’m not a big fan of long bus journeys and this one should take around 10 hours. It’s a small bus with tiny seats, but, thankfully only half full. We set off along a paved road for a few miles before it mutates to ripio (gravel road) and begins winding around a forested coastline. That will be the last paved road that I will see for some days and for a couple of hundred kilometres. A fluffy, yellow, toy duck swings in the windscreen, right in my line of sight, specially designed to test my good humour. The road we are on is renowned in Latin American travel lore; it’s the southern Chilean end of the Pan-American Highway (except it doesn’t really feel like a highway, or even a road) and is called the Carretera Austral. Over the next 10 days or so I am to become very well-acquainted with the Carretera.

Through the bus window I begin to notice wild plants familiar from my own garden and from my days at the Eden Project and its beautiful Wild Chile exhibit. Chilean Fire Bush is in full crimson bloom as are the fuchsias and the gorse – yes, the golden pride of Cornwall persists here as an introduced pest plant! We pass occasional, coastal salmon farms and sparse groups of small wooden houses surrounded by recently cleared patches of the forest. You can tell the houses are new – the corrugated metal roofs are still silvery and shiny. We wind southerly onwards flanked by steep mountains to the east, sea to the west.

Just as the ripio rattling of my body starts to affect my brain, we arrive in the tiny coastal village of La Arena nestled between a steep valley and the sea, wood smoke rising from metallic chimneys tainting the air with that familiar, homely scent. A growing queue of cars and trucks waits at the top of a concrete ramp at the other end of which are two orange ferries in the style of military landing craft. We are still waiting an hour later and I’m getting hungry since I missed breakfast and an evening meal last night. At that moment, a small local food angel jumps onto our stationery bus to dish out hot empanadas (like a small Cornish pasty, but without the Cornish) from a large polystyrene box under her arm, and sugary, black coffee from a Thermos flask.

La Arena. Our bus, the Kemelbus, is at the top of the ramp

Waiting for the tide to rise!

I wonder what we are waiting for – there are two ferries and plenty of customers. Jokingly I ask a chap in the local café if they are waiting for the tide to rise; and actually they really are. Since a recent earthquake changed the height of the land in relation to the sea around here, the jetty/ramp is now at the wrong depth at low tide ( I was given two versions of this story: some say the land rose relative to the sea, while others say it fell. They can’t both be right!).

Leaving La Arena

Someone decides somehow that the sea has reached the right depth and vehicular activity begins – at precisely the same moment that I have just bought a coffee, that I have to neck and burn my throat. Under the watchful eyes of the local sea lions vehicles are crammed onto the craft like sardines before we sail away around a spectacularly steep mountain headland that has evidently proved too much of an obstacle for local road builders. The caerulean sea is silky calm under a perfect blue sky. We traverse a deep sea fjord – the profound geological scar of a long melted glacier - and get our first glimpse of the high Andean peaks to the east.

On the other side we disembark and carry on ever southwards. Around every turn is a new vista of whatever combination of mountains, fjords, snow, forest, sea and isolated wooden shacks you care to imagine, and it’s all jaw-droppingly stunning – a view spoilt only by the incessantly swinging fluffy duck.

We emerge around a corner to the large village of Hornopiren at the foot of one of those cliched, but nevertheless impressive, snow-capped, conical volcanoes. From here we embark on a more substantial orange ferry for more than four hours of sailing to the next stretch of the Carretera. As we pull away from Hornopiren, the Hornopiren Volcano, which close-up seemed so high, appears dwarfed by the sugar-capped peaks behind, which till now had been obscured.

Hornopiren and its eponymous volcano

Cruising the line between forested mountains and islands, high waterfalls leap from precipitous, bare rock and hanging valleys tantalize with views of secret peaks. In the distance white splashes glinting in the bright sunlight indicate disturbance in the water. The disturbance moves closer until we can discern 20 or so dolphins porpoising towards us before veering off between our boat and the land and melting into the distance. Here and there, on the kinder gradients, the forest mantle has been removed and replaced with grass for cows and the occasional farm building. I wonder how anyone can make a living here; or do they just live?

Slow boat on the Pan-American Highway

On the ferry we have time to wander and chat with fellow passengers. I meet Lisi, an ecological economics professor from New York, who is travelling with Jane, a family friend and recent visitor to southern Chile. Lisi is also on her way to Pumalin Park to meet Doug and Liz, the brains behind the development of the park and many other exemplary conservation projects in southern Chile and Argentina and the main reason I am in this part of the world. On my whole journey I have met very few British people, but there are two on this ferry – Charlie and Jane – on a six-month backpacking tour of South America. They are now into month five and are also heading to Caleta Gonzalo. I also chat with a local Chilean about the area. He runs a tourist fly-fishing business on the majestic rivers further south. He explains that there are plans to replace this five-hour ferry journey – an experience of enforced relaxation and contemplation – with a new section of the Carretera bulldozed through the forests and mountains. His thought is that the most obvious and flexible way to increase capacity is to increase the number and frequency of ferries. Seems like a no-brainer to me!

Chasing the Sun on the boat to nowhere, with Lisi

Our large ferry pulls up onto a tiny ramp seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We disembark and drive up past the queue of diverse vehicles waiting to get on. I notice the first Pumalin Park signs, carved intricately from a mellow wood, at the Leptepu entrance. Another bumpy, dusty, fluffy-duck bouncing 20-minute drive later and we arrive at another in-the-middle-of-nowhere ramp into the sea. Another orange landing-craft takes us across another impressive fjord to a collection of five or six, single-storey wooden buildings, intimidated by the surrounding natural splendour, but cosily nestled at the top of a small delta beach. White wood smoke spiralling from the cabins promises a fine welcome and the end of 10 hours and 180 kilometres of ripio, sea and fluffy, yellow ducks.

Caleta Gonzalo, home for the next three nights